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Tallis—Vaughan Williams—Howells: Reflections on Mode Three

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Lionel Pike
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Extract

Herbert Howells said that the one experience which stood out as a vitally determining factor in his life was his first encounter with Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. ‘It was after then that I felt I really knew myself, both as a man and artist. It all seemed so incredibly new at the time, but I soon came to realize how very, very old it actually was, how I'd been living the music since long before I could ever begin to remember’. This paradoxical combination of the new and the old in Vaughan Williams is worth investigation, and its effect on Howells's own music awaits full exploration. The present article can do little more than introduce the topic, but it will have served its purpose if it points the way to further investigation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 149 , June 1984 , pp. 2 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

Notes

1. Palmer, Christopher, Herbert Howells: a study. Novello, Sevenoaks (1978), p. 17.Google Scholar

2. British Library Gren. 12025.

3. Probably not written by Tallis: the poem is an English translation of a Latin description of the modes which occurs much earlier in the Psalter. The line dealing with the Phrygian mode in this Latin version is ‘Terrius, Indignatur & acerbe insulat’.

4. Composers had used the Phrygian mode from time to time during the 19th century, usually in an attempt to produce a brand of ‘exotic’ or gravely stoic music. Invocations of Iberia and the Orient (as in Verdi's Aida and Debussy's String Quartet) will stand as examples of the former; while Schubert's String Quintet in C, the ‘Pilgrim's March’ in Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony, and Brahms's Fourth Symphony will illustrate the latter. These examples differ from Vaughan Williams's in that the Phrygian colour (usually the flat second only, ignoring other facets) is pasted on to a relatively conventional tonal background. Brahms, however, integrates his prominent C naturals and F naturals (within a tonal E minor) by impressing them firmly on the mind in his initial material. The opening theme of the Fourth Symphony, readily reducible to a series of descending thirds, falls into triadic shapes, of which E minor and F major become prominent.

5. Published in Williams, Ralph Vaughan's National Music, Oxford University Press. London (1934), p. 46.Google Scholar

6. ‘Fantasia’ in the sense in which it is used here is not the ‘free fantasia’ which one associates with romantic music: rather it is used in the Elizabethan and Jacobean sense. Tovey (in Beethoven, Oxford University Press, London (1944), p. 124Google Scholar) remarked, ‘My own classification of composers is into those who show that they know their theme and those who show that they do not’. Though the Fantasia is not a set of variations in the conventional sense, there is no doubt to which classification Vaughan Williams belongs.

7. Though in 1917 Howells wrote an Elegy for Viola, String Quartet, and String Orchestra which is somewhat similar to Vaughan Williams's Fantasia in its scoring. Its central section, moreover, makes some use of Phrygian harmonic shifts: one of its characteristic sounds, for example, is an A major chord (in second inversion) between two statements of a G sharp major chord.

8. By shifting the music immediately to the dominant pitch Howells draws the greater attention to the major second above the dominant.

9. Palmer, , op. cit., p. 72Google Scholar, maintains that ‘when the main melody of ‘Ralph's Pavane’ returns in the tenor we realize from the upper parts that it is in fact an implicit counterpoint to the second phrase of Tallis' Third Mode Melody, that which inspired the Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis'.

10. Palmer, , op. cit., p. IIGoogle Scholar.